A Small Notch In The Green Belt

The artist said she missed me today. I was honoured. I left early this morning. I met a friend at the station by accident, then a friend of the artist at another. (For years, a cast of her naked breasts leaned against the wall of the artist's studio, and it was impossible - in a clean sort of way - not to remember this as she gesticulated across her coffee.) An hour later, the friend I had really come to meet - an Arabist with a military bent - was walking in front of me at a cracking pace through pure countryside. Two men and a country trail. Tall trees, as a community of branches, met overhead. Lonely tracks, searching for something, went this way and that. We were, in fact, aiming on walking for the next six hours and we were just warming up. It was amazing to think, as blackberries scraped and nettles bent, that the city was only half an hour away. (Incredible: nobody around.) We were playfully showing off by running now, probably unnecessarily, up a steep hill - which went mockingly on and on - and we encountered a harras of horses to our right, at the top by a long swooping line of pylon wires. For the next half an hour, we walked through dense forest, past dangling hawthorns, before emerging into the green damp light of a small proud field. And the only sign of human life, when it finally came, was in the form of a woman on horseback using a mobile phone. She soon galloped off. We were walking in a giant rectangle and the booklet we were using as our map enjoyed quaint phrases and signs such as 'ignore ways off' and '(!)'. Just then, a hare darted in front. (!) A sign warned of baby deer. Two pheasants took flight. More horses, these ones like shire ponies, puffed and neighed. My legs were doing well, though. I have a bad right leg at the moment but it was equal to any task, I noticed, including a regular succession of sometimes gnarled stiles, which left me thinking it was not as bad as I thought, which is a good thing. We nibbled on our dried and sliced mango nicknamed 'calf's tongue'. The damp meanwhile had turned into a sharp and biting rain and as a result my waterproof leggings justified their inclusion in my rucksack. We approached a famous old poet's cottage. Respectfully, we lowered our voices as if careful not to interrupt his train of thought, even though he has been dead 325 years. At one point I peered into the smoky windows, looking for clues, and saw a colour TV blazing back. We ate brown bread and salmon by a church. We moved on, past a wall of blackthorns, or sloes. Several miles later, we passed through a small Quaker graveyard and one of the graves bore the name of a woman and the dates of 1877-1977. Remarkable. Now, the artist and the children are in bed and I am sitting at the table with unbelievably aching legs and feet, so glad I've written this down before collapsing in a heap. Nature. I tell you.